In Madame Loisel's background lay the ramblings of a house built for comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding doors, bare the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room, dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel, grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange flamboyant banter with a patron. Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coarse fish, boiled joint, third-class fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin quarter ran purple--and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at Louis's than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console! Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered. A fresh waist, a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an artificial freshness in her complexion showed that she had been parading that afternoon. "Bonsoir Madame--la la la-la-la!" called Bertram. Her face blossomed with coquetry, her teeth gleamed, and: "Bonsoir--diable!" she smiled back at him. Mark Heath had greeted her more soberly. Her eyes followed Chester's big, square frame as he moved with lumbering grace to a corner table. There he sat at the beginning of his career, such as it was, this Bertram Chester--a completed piece of work, fresh, unused, from the mills of the gods. His strong frame was beginning to fill out, what with the abandonment of training for a year. He was a pretty figure of a man in his clothes; and those clothes were so woven and cut as to be in contrast with his surroundings. A tailor of San Francisco, building toward fashionable patronage, had made him suits free during his last year in college. Varsity man and public character about the campus, Chester paid him back in advertising of mouth. Guided by that instinct of vanity and personal display which runs in those who have to do with the cattle range, he had learned to dress well before he was really sure-mouthed in English grammar.